SET Japan is the company behind the much-loved Louis Vuitton/Murakami code, and their work has transformed QR codes from boring black-and-white blocks to things of beauty. “Our design team saw the black-and-white codes as an insult to the brands that were experimenting with them,” McMaster says. “So they set about redesigning them.”

They were also unimpressed by Wired’s attempt to generate a QR code, and so decided to design us a better one, sending over three options: one with a rat in a maze, one that took our Pacman idea and improved on it, and one with red balls dropping out of the code. “The designers looked at Wired’s aesthetic and came up with these,” says McMaster. “We wanted to give you a couple of things that matched the cutting-edge nature of Wired, something that people hadn’t seen before.”